AUSTIN — Austin novelist Karan Mahajan has had quite a year after the publication of his second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, in March 2016: He was named a finalist in fiction for the National Book Award; won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction; and was just called one of the top 21 American novelists younger than 40 by the British literary magazine Granta.

The former fellow at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers is currently on a Dobie Paisano fellowship at a ranch south of Austin. He has also been busy writing opinion pieces such as “What My Red State Sees in Me,” for The New York Times. It detailed micro-aggressions as well as larger aggressions against people of color in what is supposedly Texas’ most liberal and welcoming city.

Granta magazine's "Best of Young American Novelists" included Karan Mahajan.

(Granta)

But he’s still best known for Small Bombs, a penetrating novel about a car bomb explosion in New Delhi that leaves the two young Khurana brothers dead while their best friend, Mansoor, survives. The novel details Mansoor’s life after the blast, and how his parents deal with the Khurana parents, all of whom struggle with guilt. Yet the novel goes way beyond the victims, focusing on the motivations of the terrorists, mainly a brilliant but radicalized Muslim named Ayub.

We caught up with Mahajan by phone recently (the conversation has been edited for length):

You’ve received lots of positive feedback, and I’m betting a few negative bits of feedback, over Small Bombs. How do you respond to such reviews?

I have a pretty thick skin, because this book was so difficult and painful to write. The published draft was what I was capable of writing at the time. I have a sad self-acceptance going on. It’s very different in this day and age. People can get your email address, your Twitter, your Facebook and say anything they want to.

Karan Mahajan is the author of The Association of Small Bombs.

(Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman)

I read your piece in The New York Times about living in a red state back in March, when you detailed a dinner party where the hosts just assumed you were a techie, where you answered a Craigslist ad for housing but the owner didn’t get back to you, but quickly responded to your girlfriend’s email, and other things. Could you explain why you wrote that piece?

When you write about a handful of negative things that happened in a place, they obviously don’t represent the totality of your experience. But some things are under the surface and need to be explored more. At that particular moment, a few things were happening in different parts of the country, like the shooting of two Indian men in Kansas, and underlying this violence was a mixture of ignorance and anger toward outsiders. It was particularly galling to me because Austin so aggressively brands itself as a liberal hub. So as a writer, I think it’s my duty to explore reality. That was also the moment when I embraced the place more, when you care enough about the place to criticize it.

There are all sorts of micro-aggressions and bigger aggressions against your characters in Small Bombs. Why do you think many Americans don’t get what’s happening to people elsewhere?

I think some of it has to do with a difference in how Americans perceive themselves and how they’re perceived in the world. Both sides have an abstraction going on. People outside America think of America as a hegemonic empire, and people inside America forget that not everyone outside America is subscribing to one kind of thinking or philosophy.

In discussing the tone of your novel, you said you thought that your worldview was sad and wry at the same time, that you tried to be neutral but empathetic, even when writing about terrorists. Have you gotten any blowback for that?

I think some readers have so abstracted the idea of a terrorist in their minds that they’re almost resentful to have to see them as human beings. I find that interesting. But that’s happened very little. Mostly, people have welcomed the opportunity to see these people as flawed human beings. One of the key points that the novel is trying to get across is that we have to deglamorize terrorism and strip away the many layers of fear we attach to the word. And if you see people who are perpetrating these attacks as incompetent and fearful, then you at least have to see how this entire crisis of terrorism could be defused.

Could you elaborate on how you would defuse it then?

I think the populace can live in less fear than it does, which would in turn make them less susceptible to all sorts of demagoguery. It seems that terrorism is more a crime of the city, rather than affecting people in rural areas. Yet it seems to have taken up a huge part of the American perception. The question is how do we reduce the profile of terrorism in people’s minds. And that has to be done by educating people.